In a normal walk a character goes up and down once each time he takes a step. Usually when you step, your leg bends DOWN to take the weight then it pushes UP on the way to the next step. There are endless variations of this, but that's the concept.

In a double bounce walk, you go up and down twice in each step.Not only do you go down as your foot contacts the ground, you go down again in the middle of the step.

WHY??? A double bounce step is musical. It's like a dance. It's fun. It's in lots of 30s cartoons. Porky Pig in Clampet's cartoons always walks double bounce. It shows that he's youthful and full of pep. It also conveys innocence.

This is awesome. Thanks for providing the flash file for reference. Back when I was in cartoon school I did a similar walk cycle with an alligator, even though I was pretty happy with the final product, having this would have made it 100 x stronger.

Thanks for the flash file John, I was looking at it this morning and your tips help a lot. Very thorough and I see a lot of love for the subject in your notes. Damn I wish teachers were as enthusiastic as you in real colleges.

thank you for this John! this is great! I'll get to work on it right away. i'll rough it out first to get the motion smooth per your suggestion and then clean it up. i think every aspiring animator owes you a great deal, i know i do.

Ah, I see how the double bounce walk cycle works now. I did the double walk cycle from preston blair's book. You can see it on the link below. I could not see where the "double" part comes in. After watching that quicktime movie you posted however, I think I get it now. The character has one leg in a straight line, and the other leg is curled. The straight leg bends a little bit. I dont know how far it should bend, but I appreciate you for posting another good demo. I would also like to see how you construct your drawings. I have been practicing with that a lot lately, and my proportions are always wrong.

And not only do I want to see the video, I think you should do more videos. The way I see it, even though your lessons on this blog being typed out are awesome, some people might have a better time learning by seeing. Even though anyone can show us the Preston Blair book and telling us to learn from it by copy and practice (and tell us useful tips), it might be helpful to SHOW us those tips. Besides, videos seem like the way to go these days. What with YouTube and all.

Sorry, this is a bit off topic. I really like the way your character's mouths maintain their structure when they talk, and was wondering if you had any character sheets with phonemes that I could reference. There's a donation in it for you.

sorry this has probably been covered before. but i want to go to animation school and dont know any. i want to draw and be an actual artist and not learn some computer program. Does anyone know of such schools?

John this may be a bit random but I have been meaning ask you this for a long time. Why don't you ever cover "Line of Rythm" ? That principle has helped me alot in my drawings. I am surprised you have never talked about it.

You should market a DVD/CDRom teaching tool. Like those jumpStart things. The included flash file is a big help, if there were like 10 files like that and a DVD examining cartoons and drawing, would be cool. But thank you so much for posting all this information for free. You really got a good community going of fans and learning artist. I could see how something like this site could really have a big influence on the industry.

It's like Animation Tutor, only 1,000,000 times better because it's free. It's 1 google times better.

Many thanks for the tutorial, I found it very useful. I think my characters limbs were too long for a 10 beat cycle, so I went with a more relaxed 16 beat. I went looking for some music at 90 bpm then to match that.

I know I'm sticking my neck out posting CG here.. but hey some of us love 40s stuff too and want to try and learn from it ;) Cheers,Brian